It’s official: Season 8 will be the last for Game of Thrones. Casey Bloys, the new programming chief at HBO, told reporters Saturday morning that as expected, the smash fantasy series based on the novels of George R.R. Martin will be gone after two more seasons. “If I could get them to do more, I would take 10 seasons,” Bloys said.

The rumour of the show’s end has been circulating for months after the show’s creators, Dan Weiss and David Benioff, were previously quoted suggesting that Game of Thrones only had 13 more episodes remaining after the end of Season 6. But, almost as quickly as those words were uttered, HBO went on the counterattack with an official statement saying that no GoT climax had been confirmed.

Given the breakdown of 13 episodes, and rumours relating to the news that it would be split into two seasons, a Vanity Fair interview with the director, Jack Bender, confirmed the rumours. When asked if he’d return to Game of Thrones in the future, he replied with the following statement:

“I don’t know the answer to that. They’re only doing seven [episdoes], and they’ve got their regulars who have done it forever. I know that I had a wonderful experience doing the show and I know that Dan and David are thrilled with the shows, but I’ve got this series I’m mounting for the beginning of 2017 based on Stephen King’s trilogy of books, starting with Mr Mercedes.”

In isolation, it may seem an unassuming statement, but when paired with two other sets of rumours, things start making a lot more sense as the truth is slowly eked out from different sources. We’ll keep you posted as the details emerge over the next few months.

New episodes of Game of Thrones Season 6 air every Sunday at 9PM, only on HBO.

Summers span decades. Winters can last a lifetime. And the struggle for the Iron Throne has begun.It will stretch from the south, where heat breeds plots, lust and intrigues; to the vast and savage eastern lands; all the way to the frozen north, where an 800-foot wall of ice protects the kingdom from the dark forces that lie beyond. Kings and queens, knights and renegades, liars, lords and honest men…all will play the ‘Game of Thrones.’

George R.R. Martin’s best-selling book series “A Song of Ice and Fire” is brought to the screen as HBO sinks its considerable storytelling teeth into the medieval fantasy epic. It’s the depiction of two powerful families — kings and queens, knights and renegades, liars and honest men — playing a deadly game for control of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, and to sit atop the Iron Throne. Martin is credited as a co-executive producer and one of the writers for the series, which was filmed in Northern Ireland and Malta.